Date: Fri, 05 May 2000 13:06:36 -0400 From: Mitch Collinsworth <mkc@Graphics.Cornell.EDU> To: Brennan W Stehling <brennan@offwhite.net> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: low cost consultant (?) Message-ID: <200005051706.NAA45964@larryboy.graphics.cornell.edu> In-Reply-To: Message from Brennan W Stehling <brennan@offwhite.net> of "Fri, 05 May 2000 11:37:08 CDT." <Pine.BSF.4.10.10005051131280.58641-100000@home.offwhite.net>
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>This was over 6 months ago. FreeBSD may have supported it, but that was >not listed as a supported OS. If what you're looking for is a hardware vendor's stamp of approval to use their product with FreeBSD, then that's an issue for them. But the fact is most modern scsi changers now conform to the scsi media change standard and will work just fine with FreeBSD as long as the software you use to drive the changer also conforms to the standard. If it's an question of FreeBSD .vs. Linux there's no money at risk so why not just go ahead and try it before assuming it won't work? >We really needed that autoloader as that workstation was where >I worked and I had it pulling backups from all of the other servers on the >network via nfs and smb and dumping the backup to tape. If this is how you're doing your backups now, you will probably be happier using amanda. >Doing that with another tape drive would have been very difficult since >the other ones that claimed to have support in FreeBSD did not have the >capacity or the speed of this Sony autoloader. Which implies that it's a fairly new autoloader, probably AIT or AIT-2 and conforms to the scsi standards. >But in the end, the autoloader did not actually work correctly. I had a >seasoned Unix consultant come in to help me from time to time and he could >not get it to work the way we wanted either. Tape drives are a huge pain, even for someone who's done it before. Just because the consultant didn't figure it out doesn't necessarily mean the drive doesn't work. Often it seems the documentation leaves out all the important details. :-( >In order to get the drive to do exactly what we wanted we would have to >use Windows NT and I was not about to put that on my workstation. That or get the vendor to provide some real documentation. >Just another case where the hardware vendor will not take the time to >create a driver or provide specs to *BSD developers since that user base >is still too small. Again you probably don't need a custom driver for BSD. But you do need good documentation, especially for things like gravity .vs. random mode and hardware compression on or off, etc. -Mitch To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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